Nvidia driver having a strange behaviour...

Hi. Yet, I just bought a "new" computer, a dual P3 1400 mhz, 2 gb with, as video card, a nVidia 5200 FX. Now, I've been able to configure everything... but the video card. Yet, what works:- OpenGL works, according to 'nvidia-settings"- I get the nVidia logo and I can see somethingAnd what doesn't:- From the moment I run "startx", I can't switch to the "ctrl + alt + x' consoles- Although I did configure modes (1024x768, 24 bit), and answered "no" at the question "do you want a virtual screen larger than the physical", the actual resolution is not "1024x768" and I do have a virtual screen larger than the physical.- According to "nvidia-settings", the card is working at 2x, while it is supposed to work at 4x. At first, I checked in my BIOS and, indeed, it was downgraded at 2x, which I fixed. Then, seeing it wouldn't get to 4x, I reinstalled "nvidia", which didn't solve the problem. Do I need to compile a kernel? Are there configuration files for that?- Finally, when I close my session of Enlightenment, and thus, get back to the standard consoles, the text that used to be perfectly readable, becomes perfectly unreadable (big pixels).

I did search much on Google for answers but obviously, nothing would really solve my problems. By the way, here is my "xorg.conf" file:

Re: Nvidia driver having a strange behaviour...

For the AGP rate, do you have a VIA chipset ? The drivers fallback to 2x on these chipsets, so you have to patch a file (os-registry.c, if my memory is good) before compiling the module. Everything is explained in the readme on nvidia's website.

Excessive showering, grooming, and toothbrushing is not only vain, it wastes valuable coding time.

Re: Nvidia driver having a strange behaviour...

Re: Nvidia driver having a strange behaviour...

Wow! I love you guys.

Ok so before I read those posts, I found out that Xorg disliked having too few choices about resolutions. So I just put many other useless subsections with 1, 2, 16, etc. color depths and it worked right away.

About the VIA chipset, you're right! I'm going to recompile that right away. Now, about the keyboard layout, if I put that, some keys sort of disappear, such as the tilde. I guess I need to put it as a variant or something. Finally, about the console problem, I found a website, on which were listed some possibilities, such as putting "Option "IgnoreDevice" "TV" in the graphic device section, but up to now, it doesn't work. I'm at trying to compile the driver "vesafb-tng" in the kernel. Please tell if you have some idea of other solution. Thanks again!

By the way, congratulations guys. I don't really time how long my computer takes to boot... but for sure, obviously, Arch Linux is the fastest compared to many distributions.

Re: Nvidia driver having a strange behaviour...

Erm. Basically, Arch Linux is the best distribution I've seen, in four years, up to now. But it is also the only one able to make me lose my time that much, with stability issues. So, I tried compiling a new kernel, with, as frame buffer driver, the "nv" one, which worked (I can see as well as I did, with "vesa"). However, when thinking of reinstalling "nvidia", I have, first to deinstall "mesa" and "libgl-dri" with force, and, the critical part, to install "nvidia", which results in/sbin/ldconfig: File /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 is empty, not checked.(and many others, computer crashed so I couldn't note all of them)And then, the deadly part:EXT3-fs error (device hda3) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has abortedEXT3-fs errpr: (device hda3): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journalRemounting filesystem read-only.

Now, if I try to run "fsck" on it, I get a complete crash (which happened) and then, when I reboot, "hda3" is unmountable. If it would have been the first time I get that, I would have reinstalled stupidly. But now, it's the fourth.

Re: Nvidia driver having a strange behaviour...

Last thing I can add: when I try to reinstall, when it's time to format the drive, "cfdisk" won't start because of the error: "Cannot get disk size". I'm now totally out of inspiration, about how to solve that, and I don't want to install again, and get the same error.

Re: Nvidia driver having a strange behaviour...

Ok, so in case someone gets stuck in the same problem, here's what I have done (still a detail to fix, looking for it).

About the problem with the extended-3 filesystem, I still have no idea why my computer wouldn't work with it, but, at least, reiserfs works perfectly (phew!).

Now, about the problem with the nvidia driver, what must be done is to, first install xorg (pacman -S xorg), remove only libgl-dri (not mesa)(pacman -Rd libgl-dri) and then install nvidia (pacman -S nvidia)(for newer cards). I'm saying that because many things have been said in different posts, but none really worked well for me.

Finally, and mainly, for the console problem, there is no clean solution: I've been struggling to get that to work for a few hours. Globally, the idea is to compile a kernel with "vesafb-tng", as driver, which fixes the problem. Now, this driver is included in :"archck". However, "grub", on my computer, wouldn't boot with a "initramfs" (still no idea why, but I'm sure I had compiled support for it, written the correct path, etc). So the objective is to apply to a standard kernel the patch applied on "archck" kernel.

Finally, right now, my video card, which is supported to be recognized as "AGP 4X", is recognized as "PCI", which is even worse than the "AGP 2X" I had before. So I'll start searching for that, but if someone could give me some pointers about how to fix that, I would really appreciate.

Re: Nvidia driver having a strange behaviour...

Yeah, it wouldn't be a bad idea. There isn't much documentation on the subject, on the Internet. If you have some spare time start it. Otherwise, it'll wait until the week-end, for me. Thanks again, by the way.